r/videogameideas

My idea is a 2D side scroller and you are part of an alien planets ecosystem, and your goal is to survive. You are an endangered species and your goal is populate every area to beat the game, or there will be a genocide ending where you kill everything. You would also have another game mode where you just spectate the world and see how it progresses.

The gameplay will have you adapt to your surroundings. You will have to go to dangerous areas and make bases/tunnels? I might add an upgrade system too. You would have to learn what certain creatures do and how to kill them, run, or become their allies. Also, all of the creatures interact with each other in some way. Like some might but heads with each other, or some might hunt in packs, or might be aggressive towards each other.

Some other features I'm hoping to include are a procedurally generated map, creatures sometimes have traits that parents can pass down to their children, and maybe have a life simulator mode?

All I want to know is if this idea is even worth making, and please feel free to criticise if needed.

Hey does anyone have any idea if this game is still available and what console it’s played on?

Leviathan's Wake — Complete Design Summary

For Indie Developers: What This Game Is

Leviathan's Wake is a AAA-concept open-world naval simulator set during the golden age of piracy. It layers historical authenticity, deeply reactive AI systems, survival-horror, and resource management into a single cohesive experience. Think Black Flag meets Shadow of War meets Dead Space — on the open ocean.

Inspirations & Source Material

Direct Mechanical Inspirations:

Assassin's Creed: Black Flag & Rogue — The foundational naval combat feel: weighty broadside exchanges, boarding actions, open-world sailing. Leviathan's Wake untethers this from the Assassin/Templar mythology to focus purely on piracy.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War/Mordor (Nemesis System) — The entire "High Seas Vendettas" system is built on this. Enemy captains remember you, adapt to your tactics, return with scars, get promoted, and develop obsessive rivalries.

Dead Men Tell No Tales (Pirates of the Caribbean 5) — The Silent Mary and Captain Salazar are direct references. The "unhinged bow" mechanic that bites ships is lifted almost directly from the film.

Moby Dick (Herman Melville) — The "Ahab Mechanic." Captains you shame descend into obsessive, self-destructive madness, ignoring their own survival to destroy you.

The Flying Dutchman (Folklore/Pirates of the Caribbean) — A roaming supernatural encounter that erupts from the depths during storms.

Captain Kidd & The Quedagh Merchant (Historical) — A real ship used as a psychological trap: a drifting treasure galleon that curses anyone who boards it.

Captain Moonscar — A reference to the Tales from the Cryptkeeper / horror-pirate archetype of the undead marauder with swamp/voodoo abilities.

Total War series — The "Political Front" and fleet management macro-layer, where faction influence shifts based on player actions.

Survival Horror (Dead Space, Alien: Isolation) — The Fear System: auditory exclusion, tunnel vision, shaking aim reticle — biological terror responses, not just a damage bar.

Sea of Thieves — Environmental storytelling on the ocean, though Leviathan's Wake is dramatically grittier and more systems-heavy.

Historical Record — Blackbeard, Ching Shih, Bartholomew Roberts, Admiral Nelson, Don Álvaro de Bazán, and Captain Kidd are all historically real figures used as "corner bosses."

Full System Summary for Developers

I. Three-Act Structure (+ Epilogue)

Act

Theme

Focus

I

The Privateer's Rise

Historical naval combat, politics, basic mechanics

II

The Alchemist's Greed

Experimental munitions, Nemesis System activates

III

The Edge of the Map

Ghost Ships, supernatural horror, consequence cascade

IV

The Open Sea

Free exploration, full world reactivity

II. Core Gameplay Pillars

Naval Combat — Modular Engineering

Customizable hardpoints: choose between armor/speed/firepower tradeoffs

Ammunition physics: chain-shot (rigging), grape-shot (crew clearing), round-shot (hull)

Environmental combat: rogue waves, fog, shallow reefs to ground enemies

Boarding Actions

Seamless ship-to-melee transition

Strategic objectives: assassinate captain, capture powder magazine, steal nav charts

Frenzy System: blood in water summons sharks — board fast or the gap becomes a death trap

The Alchemist's Arsenal (Experimental Munitions)

Unlocked through Extraction Missions (capturing scholars from slaver brigs):

Quicklime Barrels — caustic blinding clouds; also permanently kills undead

Greek Fire Siphons — short-range bow flamethrower (risk: backfires if bow is hit)

Plague-Carcass Rounds — crew abandons ship in terror; capture vessels intact

Sun-Fire (Master tier only) — white phosphorus; the only long-range ammo that damages Ghost Ships

III. The Nemesis System — "High Seas Vendettas"

Defeated captains return with scars, prosthetics, and ships specifically counter-built against your preferred weapon type

Lieutenants who kill you get promoted to Commodore and hunt you personally

Inter-faction Nemesis warfare: watch your enemies fight each other, then pick off the weakened survivor

The Ahab Mechanic (High Seas Madness)

Legendary captains cannot be recruited — only shamed or executed

Shaming breaks their mind: they abandon faction loyalty, paint your name on their sails in blood, use suicidal ramming tactics

Audio tells: approaching storm + crack of a cat-o'-nine-tails + manic screaming across the waves = Ahab incoming. No magic. Pure human cruelty.

The Devil's Pact — Adaptive Revenant

If you max out a captain's madness tracker before finally executing them, they strike a bargain with the deep. Hours later, their sunken ship erupts from the ocean as a Ghost Boss — biologically warped to counter your specific playstyle:

Heavy rammer? Ghost hull grows coral spikes that punish you on impact

Long-range sniper? Ghost summons impenetrable localized fog

Boarding specialist? Ghost crew explodes into caustic Quicklime on death

IV. Supernatural Ghost Fleet (Survival-Horror Layer)

These are not standard boss fights. They are unscripted roaming encounters that ambush you when weather turns foul. Early game: survive and escape. Late game: destroy them using Alchemist tech.

Ghost Ship

Environmental Tell

Key Mechanic

Flying Dutchman

Unnatural squall; erupts from the depths

Spectral cannons bypass armor; Kraken tentacles lock your rudder

Silent Mary (Salazar)

Dead calm + thick fog + cane-strike echo

Hull unhinges to "bite" your ship; undead marines pour through the gap

Quedagh Merchant (Kidd)

Intact galleon drifting at midnight

Boarding triggers psychological horror; your own crew turns on each other

Captain Moonscar

Bayou fog rolling in

Undead crew won't stay dead; require Quicklime/Alchemist Fire to permanently kill

World Corruption Tells: Water shifts color (blood-red for Silent Mary, plague-green for Quedagh). Weather snaps to either a full hurricane (waterspouts, whirlpools) or a complete dead zone (no wind, muffled acoustics, hull creaks sound inches away).

V. Corner Bosses (Historical "Stage Bosses")

Boss

Ship

Fight Style

Edward Teach (Blackbeard)

Queen Anne's Revenge

Psychological; fight through fire ships first

Ching Shih

Red Flag Fleet

Crowd control; armada coordination; target lieutenants

Bartholomew Roberts

Royal Fortune

Heavy artillery slugfest

Admiral Nelson

HMS Victory

Tactical; "Crossing the T" formations; can't be out-shot, must be out-maneuvered

Don Álvaro de Bazán

The San Felipe

Heavily armored; round-shot bounces off; requires Quicklime or Greek Fire

Turkish Slaver

The Crescent's Wrath

Oar-and-sail hybrid; wind-immune; carries the Master Alchemist

VI. Crew & Ship Ecosystem

Modular Leadership: Officers are specific recruited NPCs — Chefs, Navigators, Alchemists — not generic upgrades.

Psychological Grit Meter: Balanced between two axes:

Greed — crew grows restless without regular loot and "sharing the lay"

Terror — too much Ghost Ship exposure causes hallucinations and despair

The Spice Economy: Exotic spices (saffron, peppercorn) raided from merchant vessels let your Chef cook high-tier rations that freeze the Grit meter during supernatural encounters. Scurvy-tier food accelerates mental collapse.

Mutiny & Shipwreck Cascade:

Grit hits zero → Conspiracy Phase → signed Round Robins appear

If mutiny succeeds: survival-horror lifeboat mode — scavenge islands, signal ships, rebuild from zero

VII. The Fear System

Not a simple debuff bar — a simulated biological panic response:

Auditory exclusion — sounds muffle, ears ring

Tunnel vision — peripheral information disappears

Motor impairment — aiming reticle shakes; parry timing becomes sluggish

Mitigation requires preparation: Craft Ward Clothing from Alchemist bone-charms. Equip cold iron or silver weapons. Wearing a previously executed Ahab captain's tricorn provides passive psychological armor.

VIII. Execution System & Abyssal Wrecks

Executing a legendary captain:

Triggers a Geopolitical Cascade: their faction loses regional prestige; a Vengeance Fleet is deployed (no loot — purely hunting you)

Grants a unique Relic (e.g., Moonscar's Compass reveals fog-hidden treasure; Salazar's Figurehead reduces ram damage 80% and causes crews to flee on sight)

Creates a permanent Abyssal Wreck on the map — an underwater mini-dungeon accessed via diving bell, containing Master Alchemist recipes, strongboxes, and unique figureheads

Wreck hazards: oxygen management, crushing depth sounds, moray eels, reef sharks, and an amplified Fear System

IX. 100% Completion & Anti-Cheat

The True Ending: Earning the Ghost Ship flagship requires:

Every Alchemist recipe unlocked

Specific moral choices made (particularly regarding the Master Alchemist)

Surviving a minimum number of mutinies without losing your flagship

Collecting all Diorama trophies and crafting "Leviathan-Bone" hull plating

The Curse of the Pretender (Anti-Cheat):

If memory-editing is detected to force-unlock the Ghost Ship:

Ship lights up with Luminous Scorn (a permanent supernatural beacon)

Cannons jam, crew freezes into glass-statue cowards

Every legendary boss in the game is summoned simultaneously

Survive 10 minutes and the Kraken finishes the job

Game Sleeve Synopsis

LEVIATHAN'S WAKE

The ocean remembers everything you've done to it.

You began as a privateer with a leaky hull and a Letter of Marque. Now empires burn where you sail, and the men you broke have started coming back wrong.

Leviathan's Wake is an open-world naval simulator spanning the full breadth of the golden age of piracy — from the colonial politics of the Caribbean to the edge of the map where the charts simply stop. You'll manage the weight distribution of your cannons, the morale of a crew balancing greed and terror, and the fragile sanity of officers who've seen too many things that shouldn't exist.

Fight your way through historically authentic legends — Blackbeard's wall of fire ships, Ching Shih's perfectly coordinated armada, the iron-plated galleons of the Spanish crown — and dismantle the geopolitical machinery of three colonial superpowers. Or sail outside the law entirely and let the world's trade wars burn around you while you hunt something bigger.

But the deeper you push into Act III, the stranger the ocean gets.

The captains you shamed and left alive have stopped sleeping. They've painted your name on their sails. The ships you sank have started coming back up — warped by whatever lives at the bottom of the ocean, rebuilt from the memory of every tactic you've ever used against them.

And the Ghost Fleet doesn't care about your cannon upgrades.

Survive long enough, and you'll earn the right to sail one of them. Cheat your way to it, and every horror you've ever encountered will come for you at once.

The sea has no mercy. It has only memory.

LEVIATHAN'S WAKE — Chart your empire. Break your enemies. Survive what you've made.

This document represents a fully systemic, deeply reactive piracy simulator designed to reward mastery, punish cruelty with personalized consequences, and blur the line between historical adventure and maritime horror. Every major mechanic feeds every other — the spice economy fuels the Fear system, the Nemesis system feeds the Ghost Ship tier, and the political layer reshapes the map around every choice you make.